Ancestor Stones (10 page)

‘It's late now. In the morning you'll see it. Now it's time to sleep.'

But it wasn't time to sleep. The village was still awake. Out back, Finda was preparing the last of the dishes for the celebrations the next evening. My brain was whirling with excitement.

‘But I want to see it now. Let me see it.' I made my voice into a whine, but with a threat. Like the noise a mosquito makes. My mother lay back and turned over, pulling the cover over her shoulders.

‘Tomorrow,' she repeated. She twisted herself around to look at me over her shoulder, smiled at me in a way that made me feel less bad. ‘Send Finda for me.'

In the morning the air was cold and smelled of dust. I washed and slipped my new dress over my head. It was too long, but I had a year to grow into it. The cloth was shiny and stiff, not worn soft like my everyday clothes. I ran to find my mother.

That moment when I opened the door: in the dream, I see her
again. She is wearing her new gown, standing before the opaque light spreading through the shutters behind her. Only, in the dream we are not in the old place, but in the bedroom of the house I lived in with my husband after I was married. Everything is as it was when I lived there as a young wife, even the heavy, woven bedspread we were given as a wedding gift and the animal skins on the floor that my husband brought back from the place where he worked.

And in the dream I am thinking, how can I be married already if this is my mother, so young?

Nothing had prepared me that morning for the sight of her in that dress. Along dress, made of printed cloth from Europe, embroidered with yellow and blue thread across her breast. Sleeves that billowed out and narrowed into cuffs fastened with real buttons. When she walked the pleated skirt brushed the floor. In those days the women wore simple tunics and on special days, like when it was somebody's forty days, maybe an embroidered gown or a long skirt and
tamule
with sleeves that stopped at the elbow. I had never seen a dress such as this.

That day we bluffed better than anybody, walked in front of them all into the mosque. I felt the envy in their glances. I held my head so high. When we sat down at the back I could see my brothers in their new
bubas
practically under the alpha's nose. My father was at the front wearing an
agbada
of pure white, with a red sash over his shoulder. At the back we didn't pay much attention to the sermon; the women gossiped among each other. All talk that day was of each woman's outfit. From the outset I knew my mother's dress made the greatest impression of all. My mother was the very first to wear the new style like the Creole women in the big city.

That day! The best day of my life. The day every one of my father's wives wished she was my mother. And every one of his daughters wanted to be me. I had no fears. No cares. I did not see how life could get any better. But then my luck changed like the wind. And my life turned around completely.

* * *

There were so many of us — children of my father. And yet I had few friends among my brothers and sisters when I was growing up, only Idrissa and Ibrahim who were my belly brothers. Mariama and her sisters were gone. Ya Janeba and Ya Sallay's children kept to themselves: like their mothers they appeared not to welcome outsiders. My brothers, too, preferred their own company or that of the other young men around. And although they sometimes came and boasted to me of their exploits, we spent less and less time together.

Finda was my friend. I followed her as she went about her chores. When my brothers and I fought I ran to hide behind her. And it was she I asked the things I didn't understand, when Idrissa and Ibrahim sniggered into cupped hands but refused to tell me what was funny. Finda didn't tell me either, but she scolded them and that was good.

It was Finda I turned to when I noticed my mother growing taller.

I've told you my mother was a tall woman. And so she was. Only those days, every time I looked at her, she seemed higher than ever. Though my father was always telling me I had grown, I even began to imagine I was shrinking. I measured myself, scratching a mark on the outside wall of the house with a stick. One afternoon we were trapped by the rain, watching it fall out of the sky like sheets of glass, distorting the shapes of the houses and trees beyond, turning the ground into miniature rapids of red mud. I was helping Finda to husk groundnuts, breaking open the soft, steaming shells and peeling the thin membrane from each of the nuts.

Finda set down her pan and told me my mother was sick.

I didn't know what she meant. I asked the only question I could think of: ‘Why would that make her taller?'

‘Your mother isn't taller. That's just the way it looks.'

A wasting illness had stolen her appetite. And as her body drew in so it seemed to lengthen.

‘When will she be better?'

‘Soon. God willing.'

‘Tomorrow?'

‘Maybe not.'

‘Next tomorrow then?'

‘Soon. God willing.'

The weeks rolled past, my mother took to her bed. The house was quiet. My brothers were out all day. I sat at home and waited for my mother to get well again. Sometimes I went to her room and sat with her. The room smelled of un-aired clothing, sweat and something rotten. My mother was a black woman, but out of the sun her skin yellowed like a dried tobacco leaf. I tried to keep her company, to tell her the things that occupied my day but she seemed not to listen because too often she would laugh suddenly in the wrong place or ask a question that had nothing to do with the thing I was saying.

My father sent for a doctor. Somebody from the town. The man arrived by bicycle and carried a battered black bag, empty except for a stethoscope. Finda was displeased when he pressed the cold metal disc against my mother's breast, but she told me after that she did not protest because she knew my father had placed his faith in this man who was taking so much of his money. Under the doctor's instructions we gave her one tablet, aspirin, each day and every other day Finda rubbed her body with mentholatum from the brown glass jar the doctor brought us from the pharmacist. We waited. My mother grew thinner.

My mother was ashamed of being sick, of the sour smell that rose from her and stained the air. Finda brought star lilies and placed them in my mother's room and their thick scent mingled with the odour of sickness. As if contaminated by my mother's shame my father stopped his visits. Instead he arranged for her to visit the hospital in Kamakue. I was not allowed to go, though Finda went and my brothers too.

Idrissa described the big white building, surrounded by walls built of concrete breeze blocks and lawns of spiky grass, walkways wrapped in bougainvillaea and morning glory. I imagined my mother would be happy there, among the flowers. Of course we expected miracles. Finda was the only one who had any doubts.
The others of us — her children — imagined our mother would come home restored to the way she was before.

My brother told me how they waited many hours to see the doctor. They were sent away at the day's end with no choice but to sleep by the side of the road outside the hospital since they did not know a soul in that place. Our mother was weak and her breathing was troubling her. The dust from the road affected her greatly. Eventually a woman offered her a place to stay, though there was not room enough for Idrissa and Finda, who lay down under the eaves. In the morning they returned to resume their place in the queue. When their time came they found they did not understand the doctors' language, nor they ours. They did not have the words to explain how my mother was so changed she had become another person. The doctors looked her over, made her open her mouth, and peered into the corners of her eyes. When the examination was over an orderly was brought in to translate. The man had a wife from our parts and could speak a little of our language. The beds were full, he explained. They should come back the next week or before that if she turned much worse.

It had taken nearly three days' travelling to bring her there.

My mother sank into her bed until she merged with the bedclothes. Her spirit shrank and crept away to hide in the dark recesses of the house. For a long time things seemed to stay the way they were. My mother gently fading from life.

Two months passed. I was up early on a moist, warm morning. It had rained the night before and the ragged clouds had cleared from the sky. The sun shone strongly, patches of the ground steamed and the vapours rose up and danced in the sunlight.

Just then I forgot about that dark room and the bitter promise contained inside those walls. I felt happy. Every morning when I woke from dreaming, for a few moments I was peaceful until I remembered, and the sagging feeling returned. Once I saw Finda somewhere away from the house, standing in the street with some of her companions. They were laughing, some foolishness or other. I had walked past quickly, turning my head away. Keeping it
turned even when Finda called out to me. But that day, when I noticed the rains were nearly over, I too managed to forget.

I passed my mother's almond tree at the front of the house. I was responsible for watering it. The leaves looked withered and so I forgot whatever it was I had been doing and I hurried about my neglected chore. As I returned to the same spot I noticed something about the tree. I saw it fleetingly, at first. The leaves were shaking, though the air was quite still, no wind. I saw the trunk, the branches — moving, writhing, darkly flexing like muscles on a labourer's back. I stopped where I was, afraid to go any closer. It was as though the tree were alive, trying to pull its roots up from the pot. Finda, passing by with a tray of guavas, saw it too. She screamed and it was her scream more than anything else that caused me to start. We both dropped our loads at the same time and I remember how, for a moment, I watched the beads of water and fruit race across the dust like differently sized marbles.

Remember how we used to build our chicken coops high off the ground to protect the hens from the mongoose? In another house a pair of chickens disappeared from their roosts, nothing left but bones and feathers. Not a mongoose. They always gnawed through the cane bars and carried the chickens away. No, not a mongoose. Something else.

And in yet another house something that glistened and boiled black in their cooking pot, where the remnants of a meal had disappeared. The whole compound heard the woman shriek when she raised the lid.

Ants. And ants, too, covering the almond tree, making the branches shimmer and sway before our eyes with their myriad glistening bodies and waving antennae. The two of us carried the pot to the river, it was heavy and the ants crawled up our arms and covered them with fiery bites. We lowered the tree into the water and the ants floated off, struggling on the surface of the water, drowning. Then we dragged the almond tree back to its place and trailed a ring of ash around the base.

It wasn't as though nobody had ever seen driver ants before. Or lost a chicken or two. You could tell when they were coming, the
cockroaches flying ahead of the marching columns trying to save themselves. They infested the roofs of houses and dropped down from the thatch. But the talk began all the same. And the way those people talk, sideways, out of the corners of their mouths, using some words to say what they do not really mean, and other words to say the things they do. And you cannot shout at them: ‘what do you mean? Say what you mean to say!' Because then they look at you as though you had let the sun get to your head. As though you were a demented dog jumping up to bark at phantoms. You have to force yourself to pretend that what is really there isn't there at all. You go on with your life.

I heard it from Idrissa first. Idrissa heard it from Finda. I found her some hours later. She was removing the laundry from the bamboo poles where it hung to dry, folding each item neatly and adding it to the pile on her head. She told me not to worry myself about it. It was just foolish talk by superstitious folk.

And I believed her. Just words. I didn't know then the damage words can do. You can't feel them, or see them. Someone opens their mouth to speak. The words are there. And then they're gone. Except of course they're not, now they're inside the other person's head, sticking to their brain. I should have remembered the line from the song my mother sang: words never die.

I know who stirred up the villagers' imaginings. My father was a Muslim. He disdained such talk. Though you would be mistaken if you thought that meant he did not believe. And even I, in my time I've seen some things that could not be explained. The
pothos
brought in laws against it, and that served to convince people all the more. For who would go to the bother of outlawing something that did not exist? And Pa Yamba, I had seen his box covered in charms and
sassa
in his back room where I sneaked in once with the other children. He still divined. Only now he lit incense, opened a Koran and chanted words in Arabic to summon the Djinna Musa.

The ants. And the chickens all the way across the other side of the village. And people asked how the ants got to be right in front of her window like that. All over the almond tree that had been my father's gift. And what about her sickness? Wasn't that what
happened when you double-crossed the spirit that gave you your good luck? Or else you played at something you didn't understand? Wasn't she a Madingo? And he, who had younger wives, still so besotted with her for all that time. Not beautiful. Not so clever. Not even from a ruling family. What did she possess to make him want her? Nothing. She was only a woman. The whispers, the truth, the lies, all muddled up until everything became an accusation, in their mouths even the simplest fact sounded like a crime.

They never stopped to ask about their own envy and their own jealousy. And what about a wrinkled old man without a wife who coveted a woman who belonged to his patron? And who used to be powerful but wasn't any more. What about that? I was too young to ask the questions myself or I would have shouted out loud at them all.